At the Tricycle Community, we're hosting a discussion on Andrew Cooper's Tricycle article "History and Authority." (This was the working title of the article that was published as "What the Buddha Taught?") We've posted quite a few controversial articles in our day, and this one really hits a lot of key points to make the serious practitioner think about his or her tradition. Cooper writes that though we tend to think of religions being eternal and unchanging, the opposite is true:

History shows that religions constantly reinvent themselves as they move forward through time, perhaps never more so then when they believe themselves to be returning to their roots in the past. Religion is and always has been a creative, evolving realm of human endeavor, always linked to the past, but always working out its meanings in the present.